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Tom Hardy Explains How the Venom Voice is Created

Getting the voices right in Venom was a highly technical task, but actor Tom Hardy has tried to explain how the movie's team transformed his vocalizations into that of the Symbiote's. As a character, Venom has a very specific alien-sounding tone, and it took some movie magic to make it sound just right.

In Venom, Hardy plays Eddie Brock, an investigative journalist who stumbles upon a massive story about an organization called the Life Foundation. His digging leads him to learn about alien Symbiotes that reside within hosts, generally human, to survive. One of those Symbiotes eventually bonds with Brock, which turns the reporter into a superpowered creature called Venom. The character first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #300 in 1988. Since then, Venom has become the archnemesis of Spider-Man.

This fall, though, the character gets to shine in his own movie. For that film, Venom needed to sound a certain way. When Venom bonds with Brock, the two become something that is more alien than human. Hardy, who portrays both Brock and Venom in the movie, explained to EW how his technical team created that unique sound:

“Actually, the sound boys, they worked relentlessly to trigger [it] - I’d have to lay down the vocal for Venom in the morning and then play Eddie opposite in my earpiece, and whoever was working in the scene with me, had to hear Venom at the same time but then ignore that they’d heard Venom.And whenever I gave my cue line as Eddie Brock - this might not make any sense to anybody who’s not really techie and geeky about things like this like me - but Patrick [Anderson] would be under the stage queuing Venom accurately so I could cut across him and talk and argue with myself, and stuff like that. It’s a bit techie, it was fun. It was really, really good fun, and the sound boys, actually, to be fair, probably really play Venom. It’s my voice [laughs], but they play Venom.”

This is not the first time that Hardy has taken on a dual role in a movie. In the 2015 film Legend, he portrayed identical twin brothers, with each sibling having a separate personality and voice. Hardy used both vocal recordings and a stand-in actor to step into those roles, which prepared him for doing something similar in Venom. Although Legend only received mediocre reviews, critics often touted Hardy's performance in that film as a stand-out.

There is another voice, though, that Hardy is more well-known for. His performance in 2012's The Dark Knight Rises left many moviegoers frustrated over the voice of his character, Bane. Trailers and early previews of the movie all had one thing in common: people complaining that no one could understand a word that Bane said. Although most assumed it was because the character spoke from behind a mask, making everything sound muffled, it was so bad that it got fixed later on, although even in the final cut of the movie, Bane's words are still hard to make out at times.

Fortunately, Venom trailers show a character that is much easier to understand, and in fact, sounds really good. The technology behind the strange voice is also fascinating, especially as it allows Hardy to be both Brock and Venom at the same time.